Norah Jones on her return to jazz

Norah Jones returns to her jazz roots and her piano stool on her sixth album, “Day Breaks.”

Photo: RYAN PFLUGER, NYT

It was the release day for Norah Jones’ latest album, “Day Breaks,” on Oct. 7, but if the singer was feeling any anxiety, she certainly wasn’t showing it.

Checking in from her apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y., she sounded as cool as ever, explaining that she had spent most of the day running errands for her two young children rather than making the usual promotional rounds at radio stations and phoning her manager every five minutes to check on chart positions.

“I didn’t actually have much planned,” said Jones, 37, on the phone, her voice rich with the sleepy sensuality that helped sell more than 11 million copies of her debut album, 2002’s “Come Away With Me,” and take home eight Grammy Awards. “It’s sort of anticlimactic.”

Far from it; “Day Breaks” is the album many of Jones’ fans have been waiting for. It marks a return to the jazz roots of her breakthrough, following a run of increasingly eclectic releases that include 2012’s Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton-produced “Little Broken Hearts”; 2013’s “Foreverly,” an Everly Brothers tribute record made with Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong; and 2014’s “No Fools, No Fun,” which she made with her irreverent country-tinged side project Puss N Boots.

“My first record was such a weird success I had a moment within all that where I realized what about it was amazing and what was frustrating me,” she said. “All of a sudden, I wasn’t enjoying music as much. That was new to me. I realized I had to make a few adjustments. I realized I should do what I want to do.”

On “Day Breaks,” Jones pairs originals with covers of Horace Silver’s “Peace” and Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine.” Her backing band is made up of jazz greats including saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist John Patitucci, organist Lonnie Smith and drummer Brian Blade.

The idea for the direction of her sixth album, Jones said, came after she performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., as part of a 75th anniversary celebration for her label, Blue Note Records, in 2014, with many of the players who would later appear on the album. They also served as her backing band when she premiered some of the material from it at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island in July.

“Little Broken Hearts” and its predecessor, 2009’s “The Fall,” both came on the heels of a breakup. The new songs, on which Jones puts down the guitar and returns to the piano, see her ease back into starry-eyed wonder. Jones practically levitates through one of the album’s highlights, “It’s a Wonderful Time for Love.”

But “Day Breaks” has its somber moments, too, as Jones attempts to make sense of current affairs on several tracks, including “Flipside,” on which she pleads, “Put the guns away, or we’re all going to lose.”

“It seems like the world is falling apart in so many different ways,” Jones said. “There’s so many issues — not just one thing. I’ve felt down about a lot of things in the last couple of years.”

Jones will see the songs take life on her current tour, which she will bring to the Paramount Theatre in Oakland on Oct. 28, shortly after performing at Neil Young’s 30th annual Bridge School Benefit Concert, which takes place Saturday and next Sunday, Oct. 22-23, at Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View.

In Mountain View, where she shares the bill with the likes of Metallica, Roger Waters, Dave Matthews, Case/lang/Veirs, Willie Nelson, My Morning Jacket and others, Jones will have a chance to perform the album’s cover of Young’s “Don’t Be Denied,” a deep cut from 1973’s out-of-print live LP “Time Fades Away,” with the songwriter himself — that is, if she works up the nerve to rope him in for a duet.

“The goal was always to see if Neil wants to sit in on that song,” Jones said. “I never would, in a million years, ask him.”

It’s not impossible. When Jones performed at the Bridge School show with Puss N Boots in 2014, Young joined them for “Down by the River.”

Aidin Vaziri covers pop music for the San Francisco Chronicle. Along with his off-the-cuff interviews for the weekly Pop Quiz column, he spends most days shuffling through stacks of new releases and nights at Bay Area concert venues, big and small. He also reports on emerging trends and technologies in the industry. He maintains the popular Loaded music blog on SFGate.com and regularly contributes to the Style section.